7 Frame-Changing Experts on Social Business and Social Organization

March 13, 2012

Tweet With the growing interest in social business and how social technology can change organizations, we’re starting to hear more and more mainstream business commenters weigh in with their opinions. While these new and novice commenters won’t drown out the voices of the well-established experts (especially those who have corporate support behind them), the increase […]

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Is there a Business Model behind that Values Statement?

March 1, 2012

Tweet There are many fledgling businesses that have laudable intent and shaky commercial foundations.   This is a problem because, in an ideal world, the businesses that stand for values we share should also be able to sustain themselves as businesses. That’s the key premise underneath social entrepreneurship and conscious capitalism. Purpose-driven organizations need compelling values, but they also need […]

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“Social” Media Make “Voice” and Contribution Possible

February 22, 2012

Tweet What does it mean for organizations to become more “social”? Becoming “social” means that more people across the organization can contribute their ideas and have influence. Why? Because social technologies make it possible for more people to have Voice. What is Voice? Voice is having a say with the expectation that you will also […]

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Company Character Grows From Place Identity

February 16, 2012

Tweet What do start-ups and coffee beans have in common? For both, the place they grow shapes who they become. We don’t talk much about the role of place in shaping organizational identity, but the physical circumstance of where we are located as we do our work together helps to determine who we become as […]

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What Women Want from Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg

February 7, 2012

Tweet Facebook has a gender problem. We want Sheryl Sandberg to fix it. Facebook has had a gender problem since its beginning. Now, with the publicity around Facebook’s upcoming IPO, business analysts, portfolio managers, potential investors, and feminist businesspeople are calling attention to the most glaring symptom of Facebook’s gender problem: Facebook has only white […]

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10 Reasons Why The Komen Foundation Should Stop Lying about Defunding Planned Parenthood

February 3, 2012

Tweet It always hurts when organizations lie. Lying hurts the organization, the employees, the organization’s partners, the organization’s prospects, and most importantly, lying hurts the organization’s constituents. When an organization does something that sparks a”‘reputation crisis”, the absolute worst way to respond is to lie. As the reputation crisis of the Susan J. Komen Foundation […]

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Extended Organizations: Finding the Boundaries and Naming the Contents

February 1, 2012

Tweet Can you help me out with a messy research-related question? What are the best ways to set boundaries around subsets of an “extended organization”, and then give these subsets names so that they are easy to talk about? The problem seems on the surface looks like a question of semantics (i.e., what to call […]

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Communities of Commerce: Where the Marketplace is also the Meaning Place

January 11, 2012

Tweet Networks of people and organizations are usually either “markets” or “communities”. It bothers us that networks fit one or the other model of working together, because we envision something more –something both market and community —  in one network. We are often disappointed when markets don’t exhibit a commitment to any values other than […]

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Do Social Technologies help organization members think more holistically?

December 14, 2011

Tweet While it’s true that I’m an unabashed advocate for social technologies as tools for transforming organizations, there are lots of reasons why we’d want social technologies in our workplaces and ‘together places’. Social technologies help increase engagement and make organizational democracy easier — just to name the top two reasons. But the biggest reason to […]

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